


Daniel 5:5

by hereticess



Category: Assassin's Creed - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, i am obsessed with subject 16 unfortunately
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-22
Updated: 2020-08-22
Packaged: 2021-03-06 15:54:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,604
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26051482
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hereticess/pseuds/hereticess
Summary: The first immersion is… unpleasant. Disorienting. Those are nice words for it—no amount of briefing could have prepared you for this. It is so very against the will of your body; you are a puppet and the wires are digging into your limbs with fish hooks. You come up gasping like you’d been drowning.“It’s okay,” Lucy says. “The first time is never easy. We can try again.”-Clay Kazcmarek's final days. Written for the Eagle's Path zine 2020.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 21





	Daniel 5:5

**Author's Note:**

> i haven't been THIS proud of a piece in a very very long time—i hope y'all like it as much as i do 🌟

They call you Subject 16. They tell you that you’re special.

It’s all bullshit, of course. Bullshit you knew they were going to be feeding you as soon as they could get the tube down your throat. The Assassins lectured you at length about the kind of tactics they’d employ to keep you pliant after shoving a bag over your head and dragging you into the trunk of a sedan—well, not exactly. It was a little more graceful than that. They still didn't let you finish your cigarette, though. Assholes.

The point is, they’re willing to tell you anything to keep you docile as long as it doesn't show their hand. The joke’s on them, though, because they're playing directly into yours.

Well, here’s hoping, anyway.

-

When you're led into a sterile room with a blonde woman sitting at a computer you suppress a sigh of relief. Not because of the depressing surroundings, but because of the reassurance that your new best friend is still here; Lucy Stillman. It’s always nice to see a familiar face.

Well, she’s not that familiar, actually. But you’ve been thoroughly briefed on who she is, what she’s been doing—she may as well be your damn sister. In an environment where there is darkness wherever you turn, she’s your tether back into the light. It’s easy to let yourself be pushed around like a ragdoll when the promise of survival is staring you back in the face every day. Not to get cocky or anything. 

There are no formal introductions. No sitting you down and explaining what you’re here for, or what’s going to happen. When you hazard a question, Dr. Vidic—of whom you would not know the name if you were not prepared—tells you in no uncertain terms that this isn’t a doctor’s visit. They waste no time shoving you down on what looks like some kind of ergonomic table. 

The Animus. It must be. But there’s no time for you to prepare before you’re put under.

You begin to reconsider your previous arrogance.

The first immersion is… unpleasant. Disorienting. Those are nice words for it—no amount of briefing could have prepared you for this. It is so very against the will of your body; you are a puppet and the wires are digging into your limbs with fish hooks. You come up gasping like you’d been drowning.

“It’s okay,” Lucy says. “The first time is never easy. We can try again.”

-

You do try again. And it does get easier. Sort of.

Slipping into another life, another time, another place—that gets easier. The feeling of your body not being your own–your limbs being puppeteered by ghosts–your footsteps falling on a predetermined path as if led along by prophecy alone becoming habitual is only a matter of conditioning and time. 

The killing, though. The killing is something that eats at you. No amount of “it’s not real”s or “it’s just a simulation”s can sugarcoat the feeling of digging a blade deep into someone’s chest, past muscle and fat and into the organs, no amount of “it’s not really you”s can mask the squelching, the resistance of a body unwilling to die, the feeling of life leaving a body at your hands. Not your hands. Your hands. Not your hands. Your hands.

Your hands gripping the toilet as you retch and retch and retch.

“Mr. Kaczmarek,” says Dr. Vidic, impatient. “You’re wasting time.” 

And it goes and goes and goes. 

Killing becomes routine. Okay, that’s very melodramatic, but it’s true. You get used to it in a way that doesn’t sit right in your stomach. The victims become faceless, nameless, shapeless, bleeding out, bleeding around, bleeding together.

Speaking of bleeding.

Ghosts of things that were before start to trickle into your vision. Little things, at first, like an old clay vase on Lucy’s desk or a seamstress at a loom. Sometimes they try to talk to you and you, on instinct, start to reply. They’re always gone the second you blink, but the phantoms always linger in the corners of your eyes. 

Lucy calls it the bleeding effect. You call it annoying. 

“Will these things ever go away?” You swat at the illusion of a poor 6th century Persian woman begging for coin.

“No,” says Lucy, lips pulled tight. The implicit and it will get worse scratches at your neck like a noose.

-

In a cold, stark-white room where calendars melt into a puddle of nonsense and clock faces exist to mock you, time starts to mean nothing. Which is kind of funny, in a bleak way. Lucy calls “Clay?” and you respond with something like “так?” for the third time in—in a short period. 

Words to measure time become nothing but dust in the void of space. In the murky blackness you flail around, desperately grasping at your purpose but it is so hard to keep hold. So hard. Your task is so easily lost in such a vast abyss. 

But finally, after so long, after so so so so long, you finally hear it: 

Apple. 

Apple. 

Apple. Apple. Apple.

It’s back within your grasp.

“Lucy!”

You see her. For the first time in centuries you see her, clear as the dawn, with no ghosts, no blur, no fog. 

You see her. You really, really see her.

“We know what they want. We can leave now.”

Lucy doesn’t partake in your glee. She actually—she almost seems—

“Lucy?”

Your beacon of hope rises from her chair and strides over to the Animus. 

“Get in, Clay.”

Your tether to the light is severed and you are shrouded in complete, utter, sickening darkness. Like a flame slowly dimming until it is extinguished. There are no matches. There is no tinder.

There is no hope for Clay Kaczmarek.

-

After the sixth day straight in the machine you can begin to feel the wires.

No, no… no, no. Not the wires. The inner workings, the programming, the meat. You can extend your fingertips and brush the edges of the simulation and know where the 14th century alehouse ends and where the zeroes and ones begin. You can feel it inching up your arm, like a swarm of bugs, itching to crawl over and under and into your skin and become a part of you. Become a second skin. An extension of yourself.

It’s maddening. Time already gets so blurry these days, you don't need to smudge the lines between yourself and machine, too. 

But after the seventh, eighth, ninth day in the Animus, those zeroes and ones start to look like family. 

So you adapt. You let them infect you. You allow your brain to become fractured on a different axis but this time it’s okay because you know what you have to do. 

In the pages and pages and pages and pages of text you have read while trapped inside the Animus, in languages both familiar and ones you’ve never seen before, one line has glued itself to the matter of your brain—

Belshazzar king of Babylon seeth an handwriting on the wall— _at the same hour appeared fingers of a man’s hand, which wrote over against the candlestick upon the plaster of the wall of the king’s palace, and the king saw the palm of the hand that wrote—_

Juno knows what you have to do. Juno told you what you have to do. You know what you have to do—a small comfort, because these days you feel as though you do not know much—even if what must be done weighs upon you like all the bricks with which the Great Pyramids are built. Even if it breaks you and breaks you and breaks you and breaks you upon the wheel. Even if you become ሰማዕት მოწამე μάρτυρας мученик męczennik mártír—

You are the hand upon Desmond’s wall.

So you dip your fingers into the ink of code and begin to write.

-

Who is Desmond Miles?

What does he look like? How old is he? His first memory? His favorite? It’s hard to pull your mind back from wandering about a man to whom you have dedicated your life. You picture him at your side, guiding your hand through each stroke—sometimes he is tall, sometimes he is short. Sometimes his eyes are green, or brown, and his hair long, or short, or pulled back in a tail. “You should use Michaelangelo’s _David_ ,” he says, in a voice that is soft or rough or nasally or deep. “Or maybe _Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan.”_

__

__

You circle each other in a never ending dance, fingertips almost brushing but not quite. He’s such a tease—mirroring your footsteps, and never daring to cross the threshold. Just once, just once, you wish you could lace your fingers together and pull him close and see him, know him. Just once, to see the idol at whose feet you rest your head. Just once.

This tapestry. This beautiful masterpiece. For Desmond. For Desmond. For Desmond.

-

You’re standing on top of a cathedral. It’s dusk, and the setting sun is lighting Rome gracefully, draping over its edges like fine silk. The wind stings your face in cold, sharp bursts, like someone striking you to wake up, wake up, wake up. But you don’t want to wake up. It’s peaceful here. The sky is bright bright blue and the birds are sing-songing and you are so high, so high up, like an eagle perched on a ledge. 

You are an eagle perched on a ledge.

You spread your wings and fly.


End file.
